Night, Again is an anthology of contemporary Vietnamese fiction, edited by Linh Dinh.
Published in 1996 by Seven Stories Press, then reissued in 2006 with two new stories, Night, Again features key authors emerging from the liberalization of ÃÂá»Âi Má»Âi in the 1980s, as well as major writers living overseas.
The stories include:
III
The upheavals in the Communist world in the mid-1980s had profound repercussions in Vietnam. After the 1986 Party congress, the term ÃÂá»Âi Má»ÂiâÂÂor "Renovation", the Vietnamese version of glasnost, entered the vernacular. In literature, the new era was announced by Secretary General Nguyá» n VÃÂn Linh at a gathering of writers in October 1987. Admitting that the Party had been "less than democratic [in the past], and often dogmatic and brutal" in its treatment of writers. Linh promised to "unbind" them from that point on: "Speak the truth... No matter what happens, Comrades, don't curb your pen."
The Party was only conceding to what was already happening. The ÃÂá»Âi Má»Âi literature can be traced to the appearances of novels by Ma VÃÂn Kháng, Lê Lá»±u and Dðáng Thu Hðáng in 1985, 1986, 1987, respectively, with essays by the prominent critic Hoàng Ngá»Âc Hiến and the writer-critic Nguyá» n Minh Châu serving as catalysts. All had impeccable political pedigrees: Kháng, Lá»±u, Hðáng and Châu were Party members who had served in the war (Châu retired as a colonel); Hiến is the director of the Nguyá» n Du writing school, originally modeled after the Gorky school in Moscow to develop Socialist writers.
Although the situation had been volatile, with books still being banned, editors fired and authors silenced, the government's tactics are not nearly as Draconian as in the past. In 1958, Nguyá» n Hữu ÃÂang, Thụy An and Trần Thiếu Bảo were slapped with 15-year sentences in kangaroo courts for their involvements in the Nhân VÃÂn Giai Phẩm movement.
IV
The wide circulation of Dðáng Thu Hðáng's first novel, Bên kia bỠảo vá»Âng [The Other Side Of Illusion] (1987), established her as a vanguard for ÃÂá»Âi Má»Âi literature. Though her roots are in Socialist Realism, Hðáng has broken from the movement's sanctioned subjects by listing Party members among her targets of criticism. Later, with the appearance of Những thiên ÃÂðá»Âng mù [Paradise Of The Blind] (1988) and Tiá»Âu thuyá»Ât vô ÃÂá» [Novel without a Name] (1994) in foreign translations, plus her increasing outspokenness and seven-month imprisonment in 1991, Hðáng became Vietnam's most visible writer and dissident. Politics notwithstanding, her gift as a writer is as a purveyor of the quotidian. In the word of one critic: "She is unmatched in her ability to capture the small, telling details of everyday life."
Huong's first book, a volume of stories called Chân dung ngðá»Âi hàng xóm [Portrait of a Neighbor] (1985), revealed both her strengths and weaknesses. In the story "Thợ làm móng tay" ["The Manicurist"], fine descriptive passages are perverted by a heavy-handed political subtext. Its bias can be traced to the war, in which both North and South had demonized the other:
A story in the same volume, "Há»Âi quang của mùa xuân" ["Reflections of Spring"], included in this anthology, showcases Hðáng's literary gifts sans soap box. As her vision matured, Huong's technique permutated seamlessly from Socialist Realism to Social Realism. Other authorsâÂÂmost notably the acerbic, funny, and occasionally misanthropic Lê Minh KhuêâÂÂjoin her as writers of conscience in debunking the Socialist utopia. In place of what the historian Peter Zinoman termed "a canned cheeriness... central to the 'moral building' function of the revolutionary writers" are bleak portraits of a backward, rundown and corrupt society. Indignant and with an agenda, their goals are not the same as those who, while not eschewing polemics altogether, busy themselves with words and the intangibles of living.
V
Unfettered by the exigencies of war and politics, many writers are plumbing their own subjectivity and reinventing the multifaceted self. No "cultural fighters", the only vindication they need is to write well. Phạm Thi Hoài declared: "When a writer publishes a good piece of work, he is contributing to changing society. His intention is not to lunge noisily forward to change society, but if the piece is good, one way or another it has already served its social function." In the works of Hoài, ÃÂá» Phðá»Âc Tiến, Nguyá» n Huy Thiá»Âp, among others, complex events and emotions are rendered in language both suggestive and opaque. Totalitarian, dogmatic truth is replaced by playful indeterminacy. In one story of Thiá»Âp ["Lá»Âa vàng", "Fired Gold"], the reader is offered a choice of three endings. In an addendum to another ["Cún"], a scholar friend of the narrator refutes the story proper with a photograph, and hectors the narrator/author to stick to the "principles of realism". In many of Phạm Thi Hoài's stories, unusual phrasings and diction betrays language as mere artifice.
Educated at the University of Humboldt and a translator of Kafka, Hoài, a major player in ÃÂá»Âi Má»Âi literature, now lives in Berlin. Other important writers have emigrated or spent significant time overseas. Dðáng Thu Hðáng lived in Russia, and the protagonist of her most successful novel, Những thiên ÃÂðá»Âng mù [Paradise of the Blind], is a Vietnamese "guest worker" in the former Soviet Union. The gifted and highly touted Trần Và © escaped Vietnam by boat at the age of 16 and was raised as an orphan in France. Published in California, Và ©'s fiction, populated mostly by Vietnamese characters, living inside or outside of Vietnam, alternates between a crisp, no-nonsense prose and a perversely-wrought archaism, extending the language in contrary directions.
Although it may be invigorated by foreign influences, the soul of any literature is in its relationship to the vernacular. Often overlooked in the buzz surrounding Nguyá» n Huy Thiá»ÂpâÂÂVietnam's most influential writerâÂÂis his exceptional ear for the language. Thiá»Âp's sophisticated yet earthy fiction is enlivened by many memorable phrases culled from ordinary speech. A teacher in remote Sán La province for 10 years, he now runs a restaurant in Hanoi a stone's throw from a much-bombed bridge on the Red River. At 45, he has never traveled abroad [true as of 1996, when this piece was written]. Considering the paucity of translated books in Vietnam, even after the easing of state censorship, Thiá»Âp's eclectic reading list, as revealed in his own essays and interviews, is an index to the mental life of a contemporary Hanoi intellectual: all the great Vietnamese poets, from the 15th century Nguyá» n Trãi to Nguyá» n Du; Chinese modern fiction pioneer Lu Tsun; first century BC Chinese historian Si Ma Quan (in Phan Ngá»Âc's translation); The Three Kingdoms; Dostoyevski; Gogol; Gorky; Maupassant; Camus; Goethe; Tagore; Neruda; the Bible. Western and overseas Vietnamese critics, in assessing his varied output, have tripped over each other delineating his affinities with experimental writers such as Borges, Eco and Rushdie, most of whom he has never heard of. Like Europeans discovering Modernism through African sculptures, Thiá»Âp arrived at something like Post-Modernism through the goblin stories of Lénh Nam ChÃÂch Quái and lores of the Black Thai minority.
The stories in Night, Again testify to the resilience of literature in a country which does not reward and often punishes its best writers, where the most famous author is banned and the most accomplished is an erudite maitre d'. For those in exile, there is the unreality of writing in a language one does not hear everyday for a tiny and scattered audience. Still, the need to probe one's experiences through fiction persist stubbornly, in spite of the question Thiá»Âp asked himself once, in an essay: "Dear monkey, who needs a talented writer?"